A Step Back for Google

This post is an update on the status and format of this website rather than my more usual posts on biking, bike trails and fitness.

Back in August of last year (2012) I spent about a month converting this website to a more mobile friendly format and posted that I completed the conversion on September 10th. The new mobile-ready format has been working fine especially on small mobile devices like cell phones since the display changes to 1 column.

Well, I have had some major issues with my website rankings with Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) starting about 3 weeks after my mobile updates to this site.

I actually highly suspect that the problem with the Google SERPs really has more to do with recent Google updates (Panda and Penguin) but I need to rule out that the changes to the mobile format did not have something to do with this problem.

Therefore, I must take a step back and convert the pages back to their original (less mobile friendly) format. I plan to do this update on Saturday Feb 9th. The pages can still be displayed on cell phones but you will need to zoom in to read them properly. This blog will remain in the more mobile friendly format.

I’ll need to give this at least a month to know if the formatting played a role in the search results problem. If I determine that the mobile format did not have anything to do with the issue then I can convert the site back fairly easily now.

Regarding the Google Panda and Penguin updates I am more convinced than ever that Google is now favoring big business and the largest and most popular Internet websites over any small business or individual website now.

Just check out the results that you get from Google now. Often I will get 5 or 10 listings of Amazon results (when searching for a product for example) or large numbers of  sequential YouTube and Wikipedia pages for other searches and I need to go to page 2 or 3 for something unique or a less biased page.

OK, well I may have more on that later but I thought that I would at least touch on it here since it relates to the update that I have planned for tomorrow. Sorry for any inconvenience that you may have with this (especially on cell phones).